


Love and Vengeance

by AmeliaMalva



Category: Harry Potter - Fandom, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cross-Posted on FanFiction.Net, Gen, Lily Evans Potter Lives, POV Lily Evans Potter, Past James Potter/Lily Evans Potter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-02-25 16:34:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22499149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AmeliaMalva/pseuds/AmeliaMalva
Summary: Lily Potter is not home when Voldemort comes to Godric's Hollow in 1981 and history changes. Fifteen years later, Voldemort is running the wizarding world and is waging an open war against a muggle world that is quickly falling apart. The Order is doing what it can to resist but is fighting a losing battle, and Lily Potter, who has dedicated her life to avenging her dead son, knows it.When everything falls apart, Lily makes a last-ditch effort to put an end to Voldemort, and life takes an unexpected turn as she is given a second chance to get more out of life than a quest for vengeance.
Relationships: James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Lily Evans Potter/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. Prologue

October 1996

The coastline of northern Scotland had a whole string of stunning beaches that attracted their fair share of visitors in the summer months whenever the weather was good. On a rainy October’s evening, however, there was probably not a place in Britain where one was less likely to run into unexpected company which made it an ideal place for a meeting in secret, and along with a Muggle-Repelling Charm, one could be almost certain that a private meeting would be conducted without any uninvited guests. Lily had been to the beach earlier the same day to cast the standard wards on the place. It was a series of fairly complicated warding spells that required quite a bit of skill and time to put up properly, but she had done it multiple times before and had developed something of a routine. Flitwick had taught them to her years ago, and it was a necessary precaution in order to conduct this kind of meeting at all. She had already crossed over the first perimeter where turf turned into beach and could make out the next one in the sand.

Lily could see the contour of a dark-clad man standing near the rocks which were possibly offering him some protection from the strong wind blowing in from the Atlantic. His dark cloak was billowing around him and the faint purple line in the sand was just a couple of feet away from his black boots. So, he was at least not stupid enough to cross into the non-magical perimeter before she got there. She lit her wand to signal her arrival, and only moments later a bright light appeared across the beach, signalling back. As the wizard on the opposite side of the beach crossed the purple line in the sand the light on his wand went out, and moments later the same happened to Lily’s as she began walking towards the man. When they were a few metres apart they both stopped and looked at each other in silence for a few moments. 

“You came,” the Death Eater breathed with a tone of surprise in his voice. Now that he was closer could Lily see his haggard-looking face with hollow cheeks and sunken in eyes. He was a couple of years younger than her, but even if her own life was far from stress free she thought that the Death Eater looked older. 

Lily shrugged. “You said you had vital information, I was hardly going to pass on an opportunity like that. I hope you meant it.”

“I do! I swear I do,” The Death Eater hurriedly said, casting worried glances around him as if he expected someone to suddenly appear from behind the rocks around them. If he was most afraid of someone from the Order or his own side Lily did not know but considering his skittish behaviour, she was more inclined to think he was expecting one of his own. Voldemort was not merciful when it came to defectors, and a quick death would be more than a Death Eater betraying the Dark Lord’s cause could hope for.

“Then tell me what you’ve got, Mulligan,” Lily said and made a point of sounding impatient and slightly bored. She knew she had the upper hand, and there was no point in giving Mulligan the impression that she was as desperate for even the tiniest bit of useful information as she actually was.

The Death Eater took a deep breath and looked her deep in the eyes. “They have increased surveillance at Hogwarts. The first corridor on the left on the seventh floor has been closed off and is patrolled around the clock,” Mulligan whispered anxiously.

Lily frowned. “Why?”

Mulligan squirmed. “I don’t know, that kind of information is way above my pay-grade, but the higher-ups have been insistent on it being guarded every minute of the day, and it started last week, on Wednesday.”

“Wednesday… Swansea,” Lily mumbled to herself.

“Sorry?”

Lily ignored the wizard’s question. “Anything else? Have they changed anything about the security at the Ministry?” she asked.

Mulligan shook his head. “I’ve been stationed at Hogwarts for years, I don’t know anything about the Ministry,” he said.

“Hm, pity…”

“What happens now? Can you help my family?” Mulligan asked anxiously. 

No, she couldn't, but she did not tell him that. Lily quickly surmised that Mulligan most likely did not have any more useful information. He was a low-tiered Death Eater, and those were rarely more than foot soldiers. The information about the increased surveillance at Hogwarts was something Mulligan knew only because it directly affected him, and she doubted he had anything more to contribute.

Before the Death Eater could react, she reached behind her back and pulled out a small revolver which she had kept hidden under her cloak, tucked into the waistband of her trousers. A look of confusion crossed the wizard’s face as she pointed it at him and without hesitation, she pulled the trigger - firing a deadly shot straight into his forehead. They all made the same foolish mistake, making sure Lily could not hurt them with magic but neglecting to consider any other weapons. As if she would ever leave herself unarmed in the presence of a Death Eater. A couple of years earlier she might’ve felt a hint of remorse after taking the life of another, but Lily had checked Mulligan’s file before coming. He had the blood of five Order members on his hands and had been present at an awful attack on a nursery school less than a year earlier. Even if the man had had a true change of heart afterwards, Lily wasted no sympathy on child-murderers.

She walked over to the still warm corpse and kneeled beside it. Quickly she searched the torso for anything of value. She found a vial of a sinister-looking green liquid that she pocketed and made a mental note to examine later even if she had a strong suspicion of what it was, a pine wand and finally a small, golden locket with a phoenix engraved on its surface. She then procured a rusty teaspoon from her own cloak and muttered a quick ‘portus’ before placing it in the dead Death Eater’s hand. Within seconds the body disappeared, and the only trace left behind was a small amount of blood on the sand where Mulligan’s head had been. Lily quickly shovelled some clean sand over it with her boot before walking towards the perimeter of the ward. The wards that had taken her the better part of half an hour to put up earlier in the day took no more than a minute to take down, and as soon as the purple line in the sand had faded away, Lily took one last look at the sea before she disapparated away with a soft ‘pop’.


	2. The Witch

Lily decided to go straight home from the beach and apparated to her usual spot in a secluded corner of a park not far from where she lived. She walked between tall, anonymous apartment complexes that had never been the most coveted real estate in the city but had at least once been home to many regular, working-class families. Now they were old and worn down after years without proper maintenance, and the residents consisted of the lowest in society. As the rich and wealthy had started to leave Britain once the number of fatal 'incidents' increased, real estate prices had plummeted, and anyone with a little bit of self-preservation sold whatever they could and moved their family abroad.

Then when the Statue of Secrecy had been broken, people had not even bothered to sell – they had just left. The neighbourhood Lily lived in was not abandoned, but the people living there were beggars and petty criminals, addicts and runaway teens who liked to throw rave parties any day of the week. It was the perfect place for anyone who wanted to be left to their own devices, and since the Death Eaters preferred to place their attacks on wealthy suburbs and rich inner-city districts, this old apartment complex suited Lily perfectly.

A group of teenagers wearing old, tattered clothes were currently occupying the playground next to the building where Lily lived. She sighed inwardly when she spotted them perched on the monkey bars and swings and was just about to reach for her wand to cast a notice-me-not charm when they saw her.

"Got any money?" one of the youths, a boy who couldn't be more than thirteen, shouted after her and jumped down from the monkey bars he had been sitting on. "We could use some for a bag of chips from the shop," he clarified.

He was younger than Harry would have been right now, Lily realised as the boy walked towards her, his face still round and childish but his eyes dark and hardened. Two of the others; a girl with dirty blonde hair in two messy braids and a bulky boy with a black eye and a swollen lip followed.

"No," she replied politely.

The first boy glanced towards Lily's satchel. "Mind if we take a look?" he said and took a challenging step forward.

"Do you have any parents?" Lily asked calmly as the last two of the teenagers joined the others and formed a full circle around her. If she had been a regular muggle woman, she would probably have been uncomfortable by the situation, but Lily had a tight grip on her wand inside her pocket and merely felt annoyed that it would take longer than planned to get home.

"What does it matter to you?" the girl with braids spat, her voice higher and more childish than Lily expected. She could not be more than thirteen either,

"It's nearly midnight, you shouldn't be outside at this hour."

"And if we don't have parents?" The boy who had first approached her asked. "If all our mummies and daddies have been killed by terrorists,

"Have they?" Lily asked.

"None of your business," the boy spat venomously. "Now give us the bag and we'll let you be."

Lily sighed and realised that this discussion was not leading anywhere. She removed her right hand holding her wand from her pocket and pointed it at the boy.

His eyes grew to the size of saucers. "She's a witch!" He managed to shout before Lily's stunner knocked him out as it hit him in the chest.

The others tried to make a run for it, but in a matter of seconds Lily had stunned every single one of them. She levitated the bodies and put them underneath a couple of trees that kept them only slightly more hidden than they had been on the pathway.

Lily obliviated the teenagers as quickly as she could. Even under the trees the playground was much too exposed for her to want to linger, and it was only a matter of time before someone would walk by on the pathway and take notice of the five unconscious teenagers on the ground. Even if people here mostly kept to themselves and did not meddle in other people's business, such a sight might actually compel someone to call the police.

She knew that she was taking too much as she hurried through their memories, and she cursed as she felt a lovely childhood memory of receiving a puppy for Christmas disappear from one of the boy's minds. She was also fairly certain that she had accidentally taken a memory of an exciting first day of school from one of the girls and a first kiss at a school disco from another. Damn, but she really didn't have time to be more careful. Lily refrained from waking them up before she left the playground; the stunners would wear off soon enough, and she wanted to be safe at home in her flat when they did.

"You're a thief, you know, stealing people's memories…"

Lily gasped. The voice in her head was so loud and sounded so real that for a moment Lily thought the man it belonged to was standing there next to her, but when she looked around the playground it was just as abandoned as it had been for the past five minutes, and she realised that it was only her mind playing tricks on her. It did little to untie the knot of guilt that had formed in her stomach, however.

The stairwell in Lily's building smelled faintly of urine when she hurried up the steps to the third floor, but it was at least better than the lift where someone had vomited weeks earlier and no one had bothered to clean it up properly. Lily made it to her floor without running into any of her neighbours and she let out a breath of relief as she unlocked the door and stepped into her flat. She had only been away for a couple of hours but thanks to the building's poor ventilation system it always smelled as if no one had been there for weeks. She flicked the light switch on the wall but the lamp in the ceiling remained unlit. That made the third power failure in as many days, Lily concluded with a sigh and cast a non-verbal lumos instead before going into the kitchen.

Back in her Hogwarts days she had been the most organised person in the entire Gryffindor tower. The other girls in her dorm had spread out clothes all around the room and make-up items in the bathroom, but Lily had always kept her robes neatly folded and her toiletries in her toilet bag. Teenage Lily would probably have been appalled at the state of present-day Lily's flat, and particularly the kitchen.

On the enchanted stove (it was electric, and she did not dare rely on the electricity not disappearing while she was away) three cauldrons with different potions were bubbling, and the kitchen table was cluttered with cutting boards, potion ingredients and potions books filled with handwritten notes in addition to the original recipes. Heavy drapes covered the lone window in the room, barring any natural sunlight to enter the cramped kitchen during daytime, and more importantly keeping any curious eyes away from looking in. Lily walked over to the stove to check on the progress of the potions, and with a quick glance at her notebook on the counter and another at her watch she realised it was time to add powdered bicorn horn to the large copper cauldron. The Order's Polyjuice demand was nearly endless; after some standard healing concoctions that took no time and only little skill to whip up, Polyjuice was their most used potion. The long and delicate brewing process required a lot of attention, and if Lily was late adding an ingredient, adjusting the heat or stirring the potion even once the whole batch would be lost.

In a small, golden cauldron a pale white, nearly translucent potion was simmering on low heat. It was her third Veritaserum attempt this month, and this one had to go well. Her first batch of the potion had been ruined after the entire Order had been called urgently to help out with an emergency in Oxford where a group of Death Eaters had attacked a large lecture hall full of students. The Order had been notified way too late and by the time they had made it there the scene that had met them had been horrific. Row upon row of brutally murdered muggles, most of them in their early twenties who still wore a look of shock and horror on their faces. There had been a couple of survivors, but Lily doubted any of them would ever be well enough mentally to attend university again. As usual there was a number of young women missing. It was hard to come to terms with the fact that the ones who had been brutally murdered on the scene were the lucky ones, but there were never any happy endings for the muggle women who were abducted. Dumbledore had always been vague in his descriptions of the abductions during the meetings, but once he died and Moody was put in charge, the former auror had not withheld any details about the horrible fate those women, and sometimes men, met. Lily should not have been surprised; rape was part of all wars and wizards were no less brutal than muggle men, no matter how much they liked to think so. Once Lily had made it back to the flat after Oxford, the Veritaserum she had been brewing had turned black – a sure sign that it was unsalvageable, and she'd had to start over again only to have her second batch ruined early in the brewing process by a bad jar of lacewing flies.

Once she was certain that her potions needed no further attention, Lily sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and pulled out the small vial of green liquid she had found on Mulligan. She had seen it several times before, and the test she would conduct on it when she had the time and energy was more of a formality to confirm what she already knew. They had started finding it on the bodies of Death Eaters some years ago, and after a series of intricate tests they had been able to determine what it was; a lethal dose of a highly potent snake venom mixed with emerald potion. The snake venom was diluted enough to keep the drinker alive for at least half an hour, while the emerald potion caused delirium, extreme anxiety and agony. Lily had seen the effects of the mixture once on a captured Death Eater who'd manage to take it whilst in Order custody, and even if she thought no person who had willingly sworn themselves to Voldemort deserved to live, no human being deserved to die the way the Death Eater had after ingesting the potion.

It had taken the man close to forty minutes to succumb, and there had been nothing to be done as he agonisingly slowly perished while being in excruciating pain. Afterwards she had made attempts to create an antidote, but finding one for such a complicated mixture required more skill than Lily possessed.

She put the vial away in a kitchen drawer and reached for a notebook to write down the information Mulligan had given. It was important to do it straight away while she still remembered all the details; the Order did not have access to a pensieve anymore, and Lily refused to let anyone inside her mind.

"The first seventh floor corridor to the left…" she said to herself as she wrote it down. Lily struggled to visualise that particular part of Hogwarts; the seventh floor was not much used, and the only class she could remember attending there was arithmancy. That classroom was in the corridor to the right, though, along with an office that had been Flitwick's during Lily's Hogwarts years. She would have to ask the others at the meeting tomorrow. She was fairly sure that the Ravenclaw Tower was accessed from that floor, and they had two former members of that house left in the Order.

The electricity did not return that evening, and when Lily finally went to bed well after two in the morning, she could hear the distinct sound of fighter jets in the skies above. She tried to ignore the anxiety building up inside and attempted to empty her mind to entice sleep to claim her quicker, but she did not manage to fall asleep before the sun had started to rise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: English is not my first language, so some grammar errors and strange word choices might have made their way into the text.


	3. The Meeting

THE MEETING

The alarm clock rang the following morning at eight, and Lily woke up with a start, her hand instinctively reaching for the wand on the nightstand. She could tell that the adrenaline pumping through her body was concealing the heavy tiredness it was actually feeling, and once she was certain that there was no greater danger in the room than the angry noise from the alarm clock, she put her wand down and turned the irritating thing off. She did not even want to know how few hours of sleep she had gotten that night and decided on a quick shower and a cup of coffee to fully wake up before going about her day.

Lily spent the majority of the morning re-setting the enchantments on the phoenix locket she had found on Mulligan. It was time-consuming and took the better part of five hours, after which Lily heated up a frozen pizza in the microwave and ate it while going through her potion notes. In the hours she had left in the afternoon before she had to leave for London, she cleaned out the cupboard where she kept potions ingredients and took a quick inventory. She was running low on bicorn horn and lacewing flies again and made a mental reminder to inform Sturgis during the meeting to get her some more as soon as possible. A little after six o'clock Lily put on a jacket, scarf and gloves and walked the short distance to the park. The heavy wards she had placed on her flat would not allow her to apparate in or out of it, and the same went from Grimmauld Place. Instead she focused on a secluded corner of St James' Park in London when she got to her usual apparition spot, and with a soft pop she was gone.

Seeing the heart of London nearly deserted on a Friday evening was something Lily would never get used to. Streets that should be bustling with life and filled with happy muggles making their way to the pub or a show were all but abandoned, with just the odd straggler hurrying home in the darkness. The West End, where Lily's parents had once taken her and Petunia to see Mary Poppins when they were children, was eerily quiet with old posters advertising productions of Starlight Express, Cats and Evita still taped to the facades of the buildings. All of them were over a decade old. Once Voldemort's unofficial reign of terror had begun spreading across Britain in the years following James' and Harry's deaths, public entertainment had been one of the first things to suffer. After a Death Eater attack on the Globe with hundreds of muggle casualties, one theatre production after the other had closed down until the city that had once been home to the largest number of stage shows in the world no longer hosted as much as an amateur's production of Hamlet.

London had changed. Britain had changed. In some ways the whole world had changed. The muggles had tried to rationalise it for years; they had blamed the massacre in the underground on an explosion and the carnage in the British Museum on terrorists, but the witnesses had eventually piled up, and once the Statue of Secrecy had been officially broken, it was as if the public had just waited for a signal to panic. Someone high up in the government had leaked the truth about magic complete with moving pictures of a Death Eater attack in the Underground that had played on repeat on every news show in the world. The American President had made a famous address to the nation the same week where he firmly denied the existence of any witches and wizards on U.S soil, and had started something of a trend amongst world leaders where they one by one stated that in their country there were no such things as witches or wizards. Magical communities abroad had to tread carefully, and many that had previously enjoyed a good relationship with their muggle countrymen isolated themselves to stay safe.

There was little that the Order could do to stop the never-ending attacks. Their numbers were lower than ever and their resources dwindling at an alarming rate. They had all put whatever money they had into the Order, but even the Potter, Bones and Black fortunes could not sustain them forever. Potions ingredients were expensive on the black market and risky purchasing in Diagon Alley even under a Polyjuice disguise. Aurors and Death Eaters (they were all but interchangeable these days) patrolled the Alley around the clock and could bring anyone in for a random questioning at any time. Unknown faces like the ones the Order used when going undercover ran an even higher risk and they had lost too many members that way. Wands were an even worse matter since all the new ones sold in Diagon Alley had traces that did no longer disappear when the owner turned seventeen. It had cost them an entire safe house of Order members to learn that when it was introduced.

As Lily crossed the streets she barely had to look out for cars since there was next to no traffic, just the odd cab and an occasional red double-decker. Two others were already waiting at the bus stop when she got there; a middle-aged woman wearing a worn fur coat and a young man in trainers and sweatpants with headphones over his ears connected to a Walkman in his hand. They both suspiciously ran Lily up and down with their eyes as she joined them. She understood them. Most people avoided the streets of muggle London at hour, and those who didn't were mostly the ones normal people wanted to avoid.

Lily offered the woman a polite smile. "Do you know the time?" she asked, and the woman gave her a long look before replying.

"Half six," she muttered and then demonstratively turned her back to Lily.

She might be late for the meeting – Moody had told her to be there at seven – but she could not bring herself to care. After everything that had gone down in the last couple of years, she would neither gain nor lose anyone's approval depending on whether she was on time for Order meetings. To her surprise the red bus turned the corner and rolled into the bus stop the minute it was supposed to. The London buses were notoriously unreliable, and there was no telling if they would be on time, if they'd be late or if they'd come at all. The Death Eaters did not target the buses the way they had the tube when that was still operating, but there had been half a dozen attacks on buses over the years as well. Lily climbed the stairs to the second floor as the bus began to move and took a seat in the back row, giving her a good view of the other passengers.

The bus ride to Islington was uneventful, and when Lily got off next to the Union Chapel the streets she walked to headquarters were completely abandoned. She always used different bus stops when going there, but the one she had chosen today was the closest to Grimmauld Place number 12, which had served as headquarters for the Order for well over a decade now. Sirius had offered it up once it became clear that it wasn't sustainable holding meetings in the Weasleys' kitchen or Amelia's dining room anymore, and upon his death he had passed it onto Remus. Most of the others lived there permanently, but Lily was always grateful to flee back to her own place after a meeting, no matter how ratty her flat was. There were several complicated protective wards to get through before Lily made it into the old townhouse, and as she put her cloak in the closet next to the front door, she realised that she was just on time.

She slipped into the dining room where the impressive old chandeliers hanging from the ceiling were lit and the heavy, black velvet curtains usually framing the windows were instead covering them. At the peak of the war, just before Dumbledore's death, the Order had counted over a hundred active members. Once regular wizards and witches realised just how far Voldemort was willing to go to create his ideal world, people had flooded to the Order. Just as quickly as they'd come, they'd disappeared after Dumbeldore's death, and with every year the Order had shrunk exponentially.

Now they were down to a dozen. Remus Lupin was seated at the far end of the table, deeply engrossed in a hushed discussion with Emmeline Vance and Amelia Bones. Sturgis Podmore at the opposite end of the table sat next to the three youngsters of the group; Cedric Diggory, Roger Davies and Angelina Johnson. The three of them had been close friends at Hogwarts and made some sort of pact to join the Order once they came of age and had now been members for over a year. Many of the others enjoyed having the three young ones onboard, but Lily's heart ached every time she remembered that they were only a few years older than Harry would've been. They also had a goodness and hopefulness around them that Lily herself had lost many years ago and replaced with cynicism and bitterness. Seeing the three young Order members laughing at Sturgis' bad jokes triggered something within her that made her want to lash out and scream at them that there was a war going on that they were losing. She did not give in to the urge, and instead took a seat next to Aurora Sinistra; a former Ravenclaw who had been a couple of years ahead of Lily in school and who was known for being an excellent astronomer. Once the war came along the young witch had abandoned her astronomy studies to join the Order. Aurora came from a family of successful academics, and both her parents had done extensive research on magical blood. Voldemort had personally killed her father, and her mother and brother had been missing for years.

"Just in time, Lily, as always," Aurora said frostily. There had been a time when they had been nearly friends, but just like everyone else in the Order, Aurora nowadays seemed to consider Lily a necessary evil. The dark-haired witch's full lips had become a thin line as she addressed Lily, and her brown eyes were cold.

"Just in time," Lily repeated.

The familiar sound of a wooden leg approaching made Lily look to the doorway. Alastor Moody entered the dining room and promptly took a seat next to Remus who immediately finished his conversation with the two witches beside him.

As usual, Moody wasted no time on pleasantries. "We do not have much time, so I'll cut to the chase. You-Know-Who has intensified his efforts in the muggle world, most notably with the attack last Friday. The muggle police have counted 65 fatalities in Oxford and nine missing. Another fifteen are being treated at muggle hospitals for injuries, most of them severe or life-threatening, and it is also likely that any survivors will suffer mentally from extensive use of the Cruciatus curse."

Everyone around the table remained silent as they took the news in, and Lily could see Angelina bite her lip and Cedric frown uncomfortably. It probably took a while to get used to hearing the depressing report week after week, but the newcomers did not have the luxury of having time to ease into the reality of being members of the Order.

"No reliable witnesses then?" Amelia Bones eventually asked.

"No," Moody confirmed. "The muggle police and press are pointing the finger at the magical world, and since this is the third attack of its kind in less than two months, panic amongst the public is to be expected."

Lily noticed more than one pointed look in her direction from the others around the table, but no one made any comment.

"Unless anyone has something to add on that matter I will move on to the next. Evans, judging by the corpse that appeared on my porch last night I assume your meeting in Scotland went as expected," Moody said brusquely.

Remus' head snapped in her direction.

"It did," Lily confirmed.

"He did not have potential to become a recurring source?" Remus asked as he always did. Poor Remus still seemed uncomfortable with the prospect of killing Death Eaters even if she knew he did so himself on occasion in battle. She supposed it was different in his eyes to lure someone away to a remote Scottish beach and shoot them point blank in the forehead with no way of defending themselves, and perhaps it was, but to Lily it didn't matter anymore. Mulligan had murdered children; she would not waste any of her conscience on him.

"No," Lily replied confidently. "His occlumency shields were paper thin and his motives questionable at best. He would've been discovered within a week even if he had fully change loyalties."

Both Moody and Amelia nodded approvingly. Remus looked down on his folded hands.

"However, he did offer a piece of information that could be relevant," Lily revealed. "He said that they have increased security on the seventh floor at Hogwarts since Wednesday last week."

The entire table seemed to connect the dots immediately; Amelia looked to Moody, Emmeline gasped in surprise and Aurora swore under her breath. Even the three youngsters seemed to understand the implications as Angelina urgently whispered something in Cedric's ear.

"Swansea," Moody muttered. "I was just getting to that. Amy Benson was found murdered in the caring facility she was living in last Wednesday; the day after Remus and Amelia went to see her."

Several members were shocked at that revelation, including Lily. She could feel the cogs in her head starting to turn as she processed the new information. Remus and Amelia had been to see her on Tuesday, and she had been found dead the following Wednesday, no way-

"No way that is a coincidence," Roger commented fiercely.

"No way indeed, Davies," Moody agreed.

"That means someone knew we were there," Amelia concluded. "Do you think we were followed there? Could Grimmauld be compromised?"

"No, if they knew about Grimmauld they would've done something," Moody said confidently. "It's more likely that they waited for you there. Did you take all the extended safety precautions when you left?"

"Half a dozen apparition jumps all over England, spread out over the course of six hours," Remus confirmed.

"Good."

"Did Amy Benson say anything of value?" asked Emmeline.

"Not much, she spoke of a 'lake in a cave', and a 'boat floating over the dead'," Amelia replied with a sigh. "We couldn't make much sense of it, I'm afraid. I asked the staff if she's become less coherent with age, but they told me she's been this way ever since she came to the home in the sixties."

"We know Riddle brought Benson and another child to a cave during an outing with the orphanage once, but we don't know where that cave was, do we?" Aurora said and both Remus and Emmeline nodded.

"Dover? Hastings?" Roger suggested.

"There's caves all along the bloody English coast," Moody muttered frustratedly. "There's no way of knowing which one a London orphanage that's been closed for decades brought their wards to half a century ago."

"Bishop died over twenty years ago, and the old matron of the orphanage is dead as well. I've not been able to find any records of other staff members," Lily said even if it was old information. Digging for information in the muggle world had been a recurring assignment for her ever since she joined the Order, and she had tried to chase down old records from Wool's Orphanage for months before admitting defeat. They only knew about Dennis Bishop and Amy Benson thanks to Dumbledore who had mentioned it when they had begun the search for horcruxes years ago. It had always been considered too much of a long shot to follow up on, but they were running out of ideas.

The room was silent for a while again before Cedric asked the question that seemed to hang like a dark cloud over the room.

"Does this mean that he knows what we're looking for?" he said, and several of the older members shifted uncomfortably in their seats and shared uncertain looks with each other.

"We can safely say that he knows we're looking for something," Remus eventually replied. "If he was certain we're looking for parts of his soul that he has scattered across the U.K I doubt he would leave them where they've been for decades, but with each of these close calls it grows increasingly more likely that he will connect the dots."

"Why wouldn't he move them if he has even the slightest suspicion that we're after them?" Wondered Angelina.

"Because of his ego," Lily replied. "He probably thinks that a bunch of Mudbloods and blood traitors could never find out his biggest, most well-guarded secret. If he was as smart as he thinks he is he would of course assume the worst and move them. Not to mention that he would never have chosen such unique items in the first place, items that even have a damn theme. The smart thing would've been to pick seven nice rocks from the beach and after horcruxing them throw them into different oceans in different corners of the earth. Then we would've had our work cut out for us."

"Well, thank you Evans for that 'horcruxing for dummies' guide, we'll keep that in mind if we're ever in need of it," Moody said dryly. "Well, that's it for today, people. Our next meeting is on Wednesday next week, nine o'clock,"

Once the meeting was over, Lily lingered behind in the dining room as the others left.

"Anything to add, Evans?" Moody asked brusquely as he noticed her walking up to him. He had never called her by her married name even if she had tried to correct him countless times in her early days as an Order member.

Lily bit her lip and took a deep breath before she laid out her suggestion. "I would like to suggest a mission to Hogwarts. Mulligan's information-."

"No," Moody cut her off before she had even finished her proposal.

"But he said that they've increased the watch at Hogwarts, I really think one of them might be there-," she tried but Moody just shook his head impatiently.

"ItWe searched through that school high and low years ago, Evans. Dumbledore led the search, and unless you think he missed something at the school he lived and worked at for decades, we're not going to find anything there."

"Did you look in the Room of Requirement?" A voice called from behind them and both Lily and Moody turned around with a speed only people who have lived constantly on edge for decades possess with their wands ready to strike. Cedric Diggory stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and leaning casually against the wall.

"Eavesdropping on private conversations, Diggory?" Moody growled and tucked his wand back into its holster.

"Sorry, I should've knocked," Cedric apologised sheepishly.

"The room you talked about," Lily said impatiently. "What is it? I've never heard of it."

"It's in the first corridor to the left on the seventh floor," Cedric explained.

Lily turned to Moody. "That's the corridor they're guarding! Mulligan said the first corridor to the left on the seventh floor." She then turned back to Cedric. "Tell me more about the room, how come we haven't searched it before?"

The young man took a few tentative steps into the dining room. "Well, you have to walk back and forth in the corridor three times thinking about what you need, and then a door will appear, and it will lead to a room providing you with what you need. It can become basically anything," he explained.

"Anything?" Lily echoed.

Cedric nodded. "Well, mostly anything. Angelina once tried to conjure a room full of fudge, and that didn't work, would be against one of the exceptions to Gamp's law I guess, but I bet it could create an awesome hiding place."

Lily and Moody shared a look.

"Go wait outside Diggory, I'll deal with you later," Moody ordered the younger wizard and Cedric obeyed.

Once they were alone Lily wasted no time. "It's a good lead," she said eagerly.

"It's still madness to break into Hogwarts, Evans. The place is practically a fortress," Moody protested.

Lily knew then that she had won him over since he was complaining about how to execute the mission – not about the mission itself. "Give me until the next meeting to come up with a plan. This is the first solid lead we've had in years, Alastor."

Moody gave her a long look before letting out a long, tired sigh. "Fine, you've got one week, Evans, but I'm not putting the last Order members' lives on the line for anything less than a solid plan," he warned, and Lily smirked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: When I wrote this chapter, I totally imagined the American President as Bill Clinton denying the existence of witches and wizards the same way he denied sleeping with Monica Lewinsky.


	4. The Grave

THE GRAVE

The leaves on the trees were turning bright yellow, dark red and a million shades between them. The air was crisp, and when the chilly wind hit her, Lily was glad that she had decided on her woollen coat instead of the unlined jacket she had reached for first that morning. Godric's Hollow was a sleepy little village in the south-east of England with a main street offering all the essential such as a pub, a supermarket and a chip shop, and picturesque little houses with storybook-worthy gardens.

Godric's Hollow had been James' suggestion, and the idea of living in a village where both her worlds co-existed had sounded appealing to Lily, who after many years in the wizarding world had realised that she would never fully belong to either world. 

She never dared to go there on Christmas, or Halloween or either of Harry or James' birthdays, but she always made a point to select a random day in the autumn to visit the gravesite and make sure it was tidy and free from weeds. Moody would probably have her head if he ever found out that she took such a great risk for something that he would deem utterly pointless, but she did not care. She never stayed for more than fifteen or twenty minutes, but for that short time she let her walls down and allowed herself to grieve.

She had chosen a beautiful spot in the graveyard where James and Harry were buried together. It felt a tiny bit comforting that her baby was at least not all by himself, and Lily hoped that James' parents wouldn't have minded that their only son was not buried in the Potter family grave. When she reached the grave, she fell to her knees and she could feel the tears on her cheek before she had even sunk to the ground. Lily rarely cried anymore these days; it was almost as if she had used up all her tears in the early years following James and Harry's deaths and saved the ones she had for one day every year. She reached out to touch the tombstone and her fingers lingered for a long while over Harry's name. It was liberating to let the tears fall freely, and she sat there on the ground for a good fifteen minutes even if the grovel painfully dug into her legs.

She wondered what James would've thought of the person she had become. She had become so cold over the years. Calculating and pessimistic; light years away from the preppy, idealistic teacher's pet he had pursued as a teenager and married when they were barely out of Hogwarts. Oh, he would've disapproved of her, Lily was sure of it. If he had been the one to survive that night in Godric's Hollow he would've gone down the same path as Sirius and foolishly thrown himself in the line of fire until he got burnt, but he would've died a hero. She doubted he would ever have managed do even remotely as much as she had to actually bring Voldemort down.

She did not notice the wizard approaching her until he was standing next to her, his expensive-looking cloak blowing in the wind and his platinum blond hair somehow looking perfectly in place even in the windy weather. If it had been Dolohov or Bellatrix she wouldn't have hesitated to throw herself into a duel, but luckily it was neither of them who had found her.

"Malfoy, how long have you been here?" she asked calmly instead and dried the remaining tears off her cheeks with her glove.

"Long enough to have seen you bawling your eyes out," he replied with a bored drawl.

"Well, that tends to happen when you've buried a child, perhaps you'll find out someday," she snapped.

Lily did not realise how cruel her words were until they had already left her lips, and she briefly even considered apologising, but Malfoy did not miss a beat.

"Your tongue is certainly sharper than I remember, I never expected that from one of Dumbledore's pets."

"What do you want?" Lily asked tiredly and rose from the ground. She doubted he was there to hurt her; he had after all had plenty of time to do so while she was having her annual breakdown. No, it was much more likely that he was after something.

"It's my son," Malfoy said heavily, and his previously proud posture changed completely. "Draco. He's… he's going to be recruited and-"

"What? You don't want him to follow in your footsteps?" Lily said mockingly, sensing an opportunity to gain the upper hand.

Malfoy looked at her with what could only be described as sadness, an emotion Lily did not think the wizard even possessed. "I don't think he's going to survive," he said frankly.

"What a pity," Lily said coldly.

"What if it was your son, Evans?"

"Oh, don't play that card against me, Malfoy," said Lily with a joyless laugh. "My son was killed fifteen years ago by your master. My son was but a baby when he was taken from me. I have no sympathy for you or your son who by all accounts has grown up to be just as despicable as his father."

"You don't want the information then?" Malfoy asked almost defiantly.

"I never said that. What do you have?" Lily said and tried to sound as nonchalant as possible while she was actually itching to find out what Malfoy had to bargain with for such a big favour as getting his son out of the country.

"What can you do for Draco?" Malfoy persisted and Lily sighed.

"Very little. The Order is running low on resources and even lower on members. We cannot risk it on a spoiled pure-blood brat," she answered honestly.

"I could pay. I have money," he suggested.

Lily raised an eyebrow.

"Really? I thought your Lord depleted the Malfoy fortune years ago."

"Not all of it," he said through gritted teeth. "But I also have something you might find more interesting than money."

Malfoy reached for something in the inner pocket of his cloak and Lily tensed for a moment before he pulled out a small, leather-bound book.

"What is that?" Lily asked suspiciously.

"A diary," he replied and opened the book to show Lily its blank pages. "An empty diary," he clarified.

Lily snorted. "That is your grand bargaining chip? A diary?"

Malfoy tossed the book to her and Lily just barely managed to catch it. "Look at the embossing," he said.

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," Lily whispered. "It's his diary? Why do you have it?"

"He gave it to me, nearly twenty years ago now," Malfoy explained.

"Why?"

"For safe-keeping, or at least that's what told me at the time. I doubt it's just a diary, the thing reeks of dark magic."

Lily flipped through it, but every page she found was just as blank as the previous.

"Is it important?" Malfoy asked nonchalantly.

"It might be," she admitted, but she was honestly doubtful. Holding Helga Hufflepuff's cup had been the most singular feeling, she had been able to practically feel the dark magic as she held it. She felt nothing like that holding the leather-bound book, and she could not sense the dark magic it supposedly contained. "I suppose you want this back," she said and held out the diary to Malfoy.

Malfoy shrugged. "That's a duplicate so it does not matter to me,"

Lily sighed and cursed her own naivete. "Of course it is, you're not that stupid."

"No, I'm not. Now, are you interested or not, Evans?"

Lily considered her options for a few moments.

"Go to the statue in Weavers Fields tonight at nine," she eventually instructed and with a curt nod, Malfoy apparated away.

She would have to talk to the others, but if Malfoy truly had Voldemort's old diary in his possession it was as good a lead as any. It did not fit in with the Hogwarts Founders theme, but she guessed that it could go in the same category as the Gaunt family ring.

She indulged herself with another five minutes by the grave and tried not to think about the fact that it would be the last time she saw it for a foreseeable future. If Malfoy had found her there it meant she had not been as careful as she had hoped and that it would not be safe to come to Godric's Hollow no matter the time of the year.

She apparated to Bethnal Green Garden directly from the graveyard and walked the short way to Weavers Field. Where she entered the park there was a large, modern statue that she could only guess what it was supposed to symbolise. She walked over to one of the benches and sat down, opened her satchel and pulled out a golden locket with a phoenix on the surface. It was the same locket she had taken from Mulligan, and the one she had reset all the enchantments on afterwards. She scouted the square for a place where Malfoy would find it and settled on hanging it on a branch of one of the trees. The muggles would not see it, and neither would any Death Eaters who might pass through the park unless they themselves were considering defecting. The lockets were one of her best inventions and the main reason she could even conduct meetings like the one with Mulligan.

Lily tried to apparate home directly from Bethnal Green only to discover that there was an anti-apparition ward over the place. Anti-apparition wards were rarely a good sign; often they meant that the Death Eaters were planning something in the area and wanted to both close off the escape route and to stop help from arriving directly at the scene. The wards took plenty of skill to put up and rarely held for more than an hour, which was good for the Order since the Death Eaters couldn't put permanent anti-apparition wards over strategic areas like central London. Unfortunately, the hour the ward held was usually enough for whatever attack they planned on doing.

Lily started walking, hopefully away from the ward, and her feet led her to the nearby Shoreditch, and as she stopped outside a familiar building that she had not been to in years she wondered why they had taken her back there. The Pleasant Partridge had been open for business when she last was in Shoreditch, but just like most businesses in London it was now closed down and boarded up. The sign with a cartoonish chicken hiding behind a comically small egg was still hanging from the façade, but the paint was starting to fall off and Lily doubted it would ever be re-opened.

_1989_

_She had found the Pleasant Partridge in Shoreditch by accident when she had needed a place to disappear to after defending three school children against two snatchers in an alleyway not far from the pub. She had been on her way from an Order meeting when she had heard the high-pitched screams and had not hesitated. Fortunately, the two snatchers who had been harassing the three girls were dumb as rocks and easily disarmed. Unfortunately, the commotion had attracted more attention than Lily would've liked, and after quickly and as discreetly as possible obliviating the children she had slipped away from the alley and ended up at the first pub she could find. She had not counted on finding the best pie and mash she'd ever had in London there, and almost unconsciously she had returned repeatedly in the last couple of months._

_She knew it was foolish of her to become a regular anywhere in the city, but her life was already chaotic enough as it was, and she found it comforting to sit down by the bar with a drink or some food while Charlie the barkeeper entertained her with stories of people who had supposedly visited his pub._

_This Monday evening the pub was a little more than half-full, with a large party of university students occupying the billiards and a group of middle-aged women who had shopping bags all over the floor under their tables. Apart from herself there was only a good-looking man sitting at the bar. He was handsome enough to turn heads, including Lily's, which probably was the reason she knew she had seen him there before. Just as she was busy observing him his head snapped to the left and his eyes met Lily's. She felt herself blush and for a moment considered grabbing her coat and satchel and running out of the pub as fast as she could, but before she had made up her mind, he picked up his half-finished beer and walked over to her._

_He truly was a good-looking man; tall and blond with warm brown eyes. He was dressed in a white t-shirt and jeans but was the kind of man who looked good in anything. She had previously guessed that he was just a couple of years older than her, but up close she could some crow's feet around his eyes and thought he might actually be pushing forty and just be one of those men who looked better the further they made it into middle-age._

_"May I buy you a drink?" He asked with a deep, masculine voice with a faint remnant of a Scottish accent in his otherwise clean RP._

_"You may," she replied and tried to sound as normal as possible, and he took a seat at the bar stool next to hers._

_"Whatever the lady wants," he told the bartender who nodded and put down the glass he was cleaning to take Lily's order._

_She asked for another beer._

_"I've seen you here before, do you live nearby?" The handsome man asked, and Lily could not deny feeling flattered that he had noticed her too._

_She shook her head. "I have a flat in Clapton. What about you?"_

_"Bayswater."_

_Lily raised an eyebrow._

_"Fancy."_

_The man chuckled._

_"Well, I haven't paid for it myself; my grandparents left it to me when they died. I should probably sell it and buy something smaller, but it's not really a seller's market nowadays,"_

_"Shoreditch is a bit out of the way if you live in Bayswater," Lily commented. "Do you work here?"_

_"No, I'm down by the river. Metropolitan police."_

_Lily paused for a few moments. So that explained the nice physique, or perhaps not, she had certainly seen plenty of policemen who were anything but fit. She wondered if it was wise to fraternise with someone working for a muggle governmental institution but figured that some smalltalk at a bar could hardly hurt while she made up her mind._

_"You haven't told me your name, officer," she said eventually._

_The man held out a hand._

_"Mark McAuley at your service, ma'am," he said as Lily placed her own hand in his and was given a firm handshake._

_"Lily Evans."_

_"Shoreditch isn't exactly next-door to Clapton either," Mark said._

_"It's on the way home," she answered with a shrug. "And Charlie's pies are better than any I've found in Clapton."_

_"You work downtown?"_

_"I'm a nanny for a family in Westminster. It's probably much more boring than your job, you don't want to hear about it."_

_Being a nanny was sufficiently vague, and it would explain her lack of a regular work schedule._

_Mark offered her a dazzling smile. "I very much doubt it, but even if it is, I'd love to hear about your boring work, Lily Evans."_

_Perhaps befriending a police officer wasn't such a bad idea – the Order knew very little about how muggle authorities were reasoning about the recurring Death Eater attacks – and a source on the inside might be useful. Oh, the war had turned her into such a Slytherin._

_She smiled back._

Lily did not want to think about Mark and quickly left the street with the Pleasant Partridge to push him away her mind. Shoreditch was a sorry sight these days with barely as much as a Tesco open anymore, a stark contrast to how lively it had been just a couple of years ago. She made another apparition attempt further down the road, and this time she successfully left the miserable Shoreditch behind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN:  
> Mark is important, you'll see why in the future, but I don't introduce random muggle OC's without reason.
> 
> There is of course no such thing as a pub called The Pleasant Partridge in Shoreditch in London, at least not to my (or Google's) knowledge.
> 
> Is anyone reading this, by the way? A quick hi in a comment would be much appreciated :) Your thoughts on the story would be even better, of course.


	5. The Phone

**THE PHONE**

_Grimmauld Place July 1989_

_Lily wondered why no one had ever bothered to come up with some magical version of air condition. It was the end of July and the heat was unbearable enough as it was, but squeezed into the dining room at Grimmauld Place with nearly forty others was approaching torturous. The Order had grown so much lately that they couldn't even accommodate everyone at Grimmauld at the same time – they had to have meeting in batches. She thankfully belonged to 'group A' as it had unofficially become known as, which all high-profile members like McGonagall, Dumbledore, Moody and Remus also were part of. Their group would meet once every two weeks, and afterwards Moody held another meeting for the newer, less experienced and, as he had pointed out to Lily once, less trusted members at another location. She guessed it might be a slightly abridged version where the most sensitive information was left out._

_Lily felt the a faint breeze coming from her left and wondered if indeed someone found a way to get fresh air into the room without compromising the security, but realised it was only Aurora who had decided to use today's edition of the_ Daily Prophet _as a fan. The dark-skinned witch had been a member for a couple of years now and had recently been hired by Dumbledore to teach astronomy at Hogwarts._

" _Lupin, Podmore, you said that you got some relevant information from last's night's stakeout in Little Hangleton," Moody, who often was the one to lead the meetings despite Dumbledore's presence, asked._

_Remus nodded. "Well, we thought we might be lucky and catch the Lestrange brothers since they've often been sighted there recently, but we got something better than that. We managed to listen in on a conversation with You-Know-Who himself."_

_Excited whispers filled the room, and Lily sat up a bit straighter in her seat. Suddenly the sweltering heat, which had previously occupied her mind, was the least of her concerns._

" _You are certain?" Moody asked and gave both the men a stern look._

_Remus nodded. "Positive, it was him without a doubt. He was discussing possible assassination attempts with one of the Rosiers, we believe it was Thomas."_

" _I think he might be going insane, or well, more insane," Sturgis said. "He was telling Rosier that he was not concerned about the possibility of assassination attempts, as if he could not be killed even if we tried."_

" _That's probably just his ego talking," Aurora snorted and rolled her eyes. "He thinks that there is no one skilled enough to take him down."_

" _He didn't really put it like that," Remus objected carefully. "He literally said 'I'm going to live forever - they could all fire their strongest Killing Curses and they would not even touch me'"_

_The table was silent for a few long moments._

" _Well, there is unicorn blood," Emmeline Vance pointed out. "Not to mention The Philosopher's Stone which has kept Nicholas Flamel alive for centuries."_

" _That's not quite the same thing, though," Lily objected._

_Emmeline frowned. "What do you mean?"_

" _Nicholas Flamel has found a way to live forever, as in his body will never succumb to old age the way it normally would, but he could still die from a Killing Curse in the chest. Voldemort speaks of invincibility as if he cannot be killed; that even if we all lined up and fired Killing Curses at him, he would survive," Lily explained._

" _Surely that's impossible, Albus," Arthur Weasley said sceptically and looked to the leader of the Order at the end of the table._

_Lily realised then that Dumbledore had remained suspiciously silent throughout the discussion, seemingly lost deep in thought, but now the entire group was looking expectantly to him._

" _There is to my knowledge no way of achieving such a thing," he answered calmly, and most of the room seemed relieved at that admission; Arthur let out a breath of relief and squeezed his wife's hand, Sturgis' face lit up in a smile, and Emmeline's shoulders dropped several inches. Moody, however, stared thoughtfully at Dumbledore with his regular eye, and as Lily met his gaze, she knew he had reacted to the Headmaster's word choices the same way she had. 'There is to my knowledge no way', was certainly not the same as 'there is no way', and as the meeting moved onto the next topic, Lily felt a knot forming in her stomach at the possible implications of a Voldemort that could not be killed. Remus and Sturgis relayed the rest of the short conversation they had managed to snap up, and then followed nearly half an hour of reports by Order members from various Ministry departments._

_It was after Marion Abbott finished her report from the Department of Magical Transportation that Lily raised her hand. Moody gave her a curt nod and Lily took a deep breath._

" _I met a muggle police officer a couple of days ago," she began._

" _On purpose?" Moody asked._

_Lily shook her head. "No, he approached me in a pub. I doubt he has a very important position, but he could give us some insight into how muggle authorities are reasoning about attacks carried out by wizards."_

" _I don't see why we'd need to know that. It's not as if the muggles are posing a threat to us," Elphias Doge said._

" _This war is spilling into the muggle world more for every day, Elphias," Dumbledore said calmly. "It's the muggles who are paying the highest price for Voldemort's war, and even if they don't have magic, they do have other means of defending themselves, and if the attacks keep coming, they will start using them. I think Lily could be right about the importance of knowing what the muggle authorities are thinking,"_

_Several members nodded in agreement. Dumbledore's words weighed heavier than anyone else's, and Lily had no doubt that they'd be must more hesitant if he had not spoken up._

" _This police officer, who is he?" Moody asked._

" _His name is Mark McAuley, he lives in Bayswater and works for the Metropolitan Police," Lily replied._

" _Isn't Bayswater a bit pricey for a London police officer?" Emmeline, who was raised by two squib parents and knew muggle London better than most of the Order, asked._

" _Inheritance from his grandparents," Lily answered which seemed to satisfy the others._

" _Look him up properly before you start playing secret agent, Evans. Make sure he's not some Death Eater in disguise," Moody advised gruffly._

_The thought had already occurred to Lily, and she nodded in agreement to Moody's suggestion._

_After that the meeting quickly finished. Arthur and Molly rushed away to get home to their large brood of children; the elder boys were watching their younger siblings while the parents were away, and both the adult Weasleys were understandably anxious to get back before the twins tore the entire house down. Dumbledore, McGonagall and Flitwick apparated back to Hogwarts whilst Aurora stayed the night to get some quality time with Emmeline who lived at Grimmauld Place along with a couple of other Order members. At first it had been a matter of convenience, and to an extent, economy, but after Dedalus Diggle had been brutally murdered in his own flat by Death Eaters less than a year earlier, it had become clear that all Order members had to increase the security precautions on their homes, and for some of them it was better to move to headquarters. Lily had placed every protective charm she knew on her flat in Clapton and even dragged Flitwick there on the Overground to check that she hadn't missed anything._

_Lily was busy putting on her coat and scarf in the hallway when she heard a voice addressing her from up the stairs._

" _You know there's an empty guest room on the second floor if you'd like to stay the night, Lily," Aurora said warmly, her fingers interlaced with Emmeline's. The other witch was a couple of steps further up the stairs but still held onto Aurora's hand and gently caressed it as she waited for her to finish talking to Lily._

" _Thanks, but I must get back to my potions," Lily declined politely. Aurora often made those kinds of offers, and at first Lily had assumed it to be a matter of politeness, but since Lily usually declined and Aurora kept asking, she wondered if the other witch might be offering her a branch of friendship._

" _Our door is always open for you if you change your mind. Have a safe journey home," Aurora said softly before following Emmeline up the stairs._

_Lily looked thoughtfully at them as they disappeared to the first floor. Maybe they weren't interested in friendship - maybe they were just trying to coax her into a threesome._

* * *

_Lily's detective skills managed to dig up that Mark McAuley was born in Glasgow but had moved to London in his teens when his parents died in a car crash and an uncle became his guardian. He was 38 years old and there were school records of him all the way from primary to when he graduated from the police academy. There was nothing to suggest any involvement in the Wizarding World at all, which meant that she could go ahead and call the number on the crumbled note in her coat pocket._

_She was surprised to feel a flutter of nerves in her stomach at the thought of seeing him again. She had not felt that since James, and even if she had occasionally entertained the idea of pursuing a new relationship, she had never found anyone who made her feel like she truly wanted to before._

* * *

" _I'm glad you decided to see me again," Mark said as Lily took a seat next to him at the bar. It was more crowded tonight, it being Friday and all, but he had managed to grab two stools by the wall. He was looking every bit as good as she remembered and had even done her the curtesy of rolling up his shirt sleeves, revealing two strong underarms that were both clearly lacking a Dark Mark._

_Lily offered him a smile that she hoped was a bit flirtatious._

" _Well, you did offer to buy me a beer at the best pub in Shoreditch, so how could I possibly refuse?_

* * *

**1996**

The diary occupied most of Lily's thoughts the days following her meeting with Malfoy in Godric's Hollow. She had been back to Weavers Field the following day and there had been no sign of the locket, so she assumed that Malfoy had found it and understood who had left it there. He was, after all, not entirely stupid. She had sent a short message instructing him to wait while she conferred with the others. The next Order meeting was planned for Wednesday, and even if Lily had a strong feeling about the diary it did not qualify as an emergency, which was the only time they ever held extra meetings.

When Wednesday came along, she waited the entire day for the Polyjuice and Veritaserum to reach their final stage, and late in the afternoon and soon before Lily had to leave, they did. To her relief both the Polyjuice and the Veritaserum came out perfect and could be poured into flasks and vials that Lily put in her satchel to bring with her to the meeting. She realised she had a little time left before she had to leave for Grimmauld and grabbed a handful of Fluxweed to start up another batch of Polyjuice on the stove when she heard the shrill ringing of the phone in the living room. She immediately froze.

That phone had not rung for years. She had used it to call Mark when she still lived in Clapton, and he had of course called her as well. After moving, the phone number had changed and she had used it a couple of times years ago for her 'detective work' as Moody called it when she researched different things in the muggle world but had then decided that it was too much of a risk. She could not recall why she hadn't thrown it out, or why she hadn't even unplugged it.

The phone rang for what felt like hours, and Lily remained frozen in place by the counter with the Fluxweed still untouched on the cutting board. Her mind was spinning. No one had the phone number to this flat; in fact, Lily did not even know the number herself.

Eventually it stopped and Lily let out a breath she had not even realised she had been holding. With shaky hands she cut the Fluxweed and added it to the cauldron. The first steps of Polyjuice, which she had made countless times before, took longer for Lily than they had in years, and by the time she left the flat she was running late for the meeting.

Due to a delayed bus from London Bridge to Islington, Lily was nearly twenty minutes late by the time she finally made it to the lovely little park that was located just outside Grimmauld Place. Despite everything going on, the park was still well-maintained and felt like something of an oasis in the otherwise grey and dacying city. She could see Grimmauld Place number 11 and 13 between the long-hanging branches of the trees when she felt the ground shaking. They did not have earthquakes in Britain, Lily had time to think.

With an ear-deafening blow the entire building in front of her went up in flames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Sorry to give you a chapter that both consists mainly of a flashback and ends with a bit of a cliff-hanger.


	6. The Wand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: This entire chapter consists of flashbacks. Some poor planning of the chapter outlines is to blame I'm afraid, since some things must be revealed before other things happen… if that makes sense.
> 
> Anyways, I hope you'll be patient with me and I swear I'll get back to the present in the next chapter.

_**Bayswater, March 1990** _

_Lily's hand was warmly enveloped in Mark's as they leisurely strolled down the road in Bayswater to his flat. It felt like such a wonderfully normal thing to do – walking home from the tube station to your boyfriend's flat on a Friday evening after a few drinks at the pub. Normal things were a rare luxury in Lily's life, and even if her relationship with Mark initially had been a way to gain useful information for the Order, it had taken very little time before gathering information had dropped to the bottom of the priority list whenever she saw him. Lily was surprised by how much she liked him, and how quickly they had established a relationship. It was not entirely unlike how she had once fallen for James Potter, although that felt like a lifetime ago._

_Mark was busy telling her about how he had seen her several times at the pub before approaching her that fateful Friday nearly nine months ago._

"… _and Charlie walked up to me and called me a coward for not having the guts to ask you out," he said animatedly._

" _No, he didn't," Lily protested playfully._

" _He did! I made a bet with him that the next time you showed up I'd talk to you, or I'd clean dishes for free every Friday night for a month."_

_Lily rolled her eyes. "I'm going to ask him about that," she vowed._

" _Oh no, Charlie's much too proud to admit to losing a bet," Mark said with a glint in his eye._

_Lily just shook her head with an amused smile on her face._

_They had settled into a nice routine over the last couple of months. They'd always spend Friday evenings as well as most of Saturday together and made a point of meeting up at least once more every week for lunch, dinner or just a cup of tea at some overpriced place in the city. Mark had an irregular work schedule, and for Lily one week was never the same as another, although he thought that was due to her made-up employees the Prestons in Westminster and their rambunctious children. In reality, it was thanks to Death Eaters who were getting increasingly brazen with their attacks on muggles._

_Suddenly a loud banging noise erupted from somewhere much too close for comfort, followed by a number of panicked screams._

" _What was that?" Lily asked and looked at Mark who had twisted around towards the source of the noise._

_A dark-clad figure in a mask appeared suddenly on the street before them and Lily did not have time to consider the consequences. She let go of Mark's hand, whipped out her wand and sent a stunner straight in the Death Eater's chest before he had the chance to fire one at them. It must have been a very green Death Eater, Lily would later realise, because he didn't even attempt to deflect the spell._

_Lily didn't give Mark time to process what he had just witnessed, instead she took his right hand in her left and started hurrying down the street with her wand still tightly clutched._

" _Oh my God," Mark said, and his breathing grew quicker. He was certainly in much better shape than Lily, so it was definitely not from the brisk walk – he must be in shock, she realised._

" _Calm down, we're not out of the woods yet," Lily urged and turned her hand back and forth to look for possible threats._

" _You're a terrorist," he said accusingly as she pulled him along down the street._

" _We can speak later, now we have to get away," she snapped and kept pushing forward._

_They didn't speak again until they reached the front door to the building where Mark lived. With shaky hands he fished out his keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the door._

_As soon as they were inside Mark's flat and the door was shut he turned to Lily with a serious expression on his face._

" _Explain," he said shortly, and Lily sighed._

" _What do you want to know?" She asked._

" _We know that the attacks on the tube network are most likely carried out by groups of people like you-"_

" _You haven't told me that," she said._

" _It's classified."_

" _Tell me, then, what do you know about us?"_

_Mark clearly hesitated before he answered. "We know that you have very powerful weapons that can cause extreme damage. Weapons that we've never seen before. There are theories on them being developed in the Middle East, the Balkan, Central America… Freaking everywhere. Gillespie at work had a theory last week that they're made in Antarctica, but the truth is that for all we know, they just as well could be. We only know that the weapons you people carry are highly lethal, and that they eject different kinds of dangerous blasts."_

_Lily showed him her wand._

" _Weapons like this?" she asked._

_Mark instinctively took a step back and almost_

" _Yes."_

_Lily held out her wand to him. "Take it," she told him._

_He hesitated._

" _Go on, take it," she repeated._

_Slowly, he took two steps forward and took the wand from her hand._

" _Now use it. Point it at something. Anything," she instructed, and Mark looked around the room before pointing it at a vase on the mantelpiece. Nothing happened. He tried the lamp hanging over the dining room table. Nothing. The cushions on the sofa. The fruit bowl. The TV. Nothing, nothing, nothing._

_With a frustrated growl Mark gave up and brought the wand up to eye-level to inspect it closer. His fingers ran over the smooth wood and he squeezed it between his thumb and index finger._

" _There has to be a trigger, or a switch... Something! Does it only respond to your fingerprints?" He asked and Lily raised an eyebrow._

" _I'm not James Bond," she replied._

_Mark stared at her with a shocked, almost worried expression on his face for a long moment._

" _How does it work then?" He eventually asked._

_Wandlessly, Lily summoned the wand which flew out of Mark's hand and into her own in an instant._

_His eyes grew to the size of saucers._

" _Y-you. It's... it's not just a weapon?" He asked dumbfoundedly._

" _You hadn't figured that out?"_

" _N-no… we thought… we assumed that the sticks… that the_ weapons _were what set you apart, but… oh, Jesus, it definitely isn't, is it? It's_ you _that's different."_

_Lily could tell that Mark was growing increasingly more shocked. He had sunk down on one of the uncomfortable dining chairs that looked very stylish but was awful to sit on, and stared into space._

" _I'm a witch," she said simply._

_Mark looked up at her. "This must be some sick joke. What do you mean by that?"_

_She wordlessly turned one of the dining chairs into a goose and then back again, had two of the tiny espresso cups on the kitchen counter do a happy little dance, and finished off with levitating the couch several feet into the air and spinning it around._

" _I know it's a lot to take in," Lily said as she carefully put the couch back in its place in front of the TV._

_Mark just nodded._

" _It certainly is," he said blankly._

_Lily took a seat across from him at the table._

" _You can't tell anyone about this," she said sternly and looked him deeply in the eyes. "We have something called the Statue of Secrecy in the Wizarding World-"_

" _The Wizarding World?" Mark said incredulously._

_Lily paused._

" _Yes, we have our own government, hospital, school… There's an all-wizard village in Scotland, and a shopping street in London," she explained and briefly wondered if it really was wise to reveal that much at this stage._

" _How is that possible?"_

" _Lots and lots of concealment and muggle-repellent charms."_

_Mark stared at her with a confused look on his face._

" _Muggle?" he asked._

" _Non-magical people," Lily clarified._

_He gave her a long look._

" _Huh, there's a word for that?"_

" _Witches and wizards have managed to live next to the muggle world for generations. This isn't something new. The Ministry of Magic-"_

_Mark snorted and shook his head in disbelief._

" _\- was founded in 1707, replacing the previous Wizard's Council which had been around since the 13_ _th_ _century," Lily explained, recalling the facts from her History of Magic O.W.L exams._

" _So, does that mean that your lot is responsible for every inexplicable incident in history? Are the UFOs yours too?"_

" _Of course not," Lily huffed. "Throughout history it's been very rare with wizards killing muggles, even more so in the last centuries. Well, up until two decades ago."_

" _What changed?"_

_Lily carefully weighed her words before she answered._

" _A couple of years ago, or decades I guess, a very powerful wizard started to gain power. There has always been a minority of wizards who consider muggles inferior, and even those who have advocated for some sort of oppression of them, but before this recent wizard there wasn't much of a movement. However, he has managed to mobilise a number of followers, and has gained more support amongst more mainstream wizards as well. There's a lot of prejudice against anything muggle in the wizarding world, and he has exploited that."_

" _Are you telling me that we have some sort of magical Hitler to thank for this mess?" Mark exclaimed._

" _Well, you're not entirely wrong there," she admitted. "Mark, if this is too much to take in, I need you to tell me," Lily said seriously._

_Mark frowned._

" _What do you mean?"_

" _I need you to understand that you cannot tell anyone about this. No one at work, none of your friends. No one. If you feel that it's too much to handle you must tell me right now."_

_So that I can remove all your memories of me, she thought, and felt a knot in her stomach at the prospect of removing herself from his life and his memories._

_Mark shook his head._

" _No, no, I'll be fine, I just need a minute, that's all," he hurriedly said, and Lily offered him a weak smile._

" _You're certain?" She asked._

_Mark took both her hands in his and squeezed them tightly._

" _Of course."_

_There was an Order meeting the next evening, and afterwards Lily stayed behind and managed to get a one-on-one conversation with Dumbledore. She briefly explained what had happened the previous day and how she had been forced to reveal that she was a witch._

" _What do you think I should do? Should I obliviate him?" She asked. They were alone in the dining room after the others had left, and_

" _You don't want to obliviate him, do you?" Dumbledore guessed._

_Lily wondered how he did that; how he so often managed to pinpoint exactly what someone was thinking or feeling. She had always assumed that it was simply a matter of Dumbledore being an excellent judge of character, but Lily's more cynical side had sometimes entertained the idea that it might be some extremely light and discreet version of legilimency._

" _That is hardly relevant. If it needs to be done, then I'll do it," she said determinedly even if just thinking about it felt awful. What she had found with Mark felt more precious than anything she'd had in years, and the idea of losing it was enough to make her feel slightly panicked._

" _He told you that the authorities think that the Death Eaters are part of a terrorist group with a_

_special kind of weapons, and the wands being those weapons?" Dumbledore asked._

" _Not only the Death Eaters, but all witches and wizards. He thought it was the wands that set us apart, he was quite shocked when I showed him some wandless magic," Lily clarified._

_Dumbledore leaned back in his seat and thoughtfully stroked his beard._

" _Hm, interesting. Well, he's proven to be a quite useful source of information then, hasn't he?" Dumbledore said and Lily nodded._

" _Yes," she._

" _Do you trust him?"_

_Lily paused for a few moments. Did she trust him? He had given no indication that he would talk to anyone about what Lily had revealed to him._

" _I do. I do trust him," she decided._

" _Very well, then," Dumbledore said and rose from his chair._

" _What if I'm wrong?" she asked abruptly. "What if I'm wrong and he tells his friends or his colleagues or his boss?"_

_Dumbledore smiled reassuringly._

" _Then I suppose we'll have some obliviating to do," he said calmly, and when he noticed that she still did not look entirely convinced he looked deep into her eyes._

" _Lily, one muggle is not going to overthrow the entire Statue of Secrecy."_

_**Bayswater, June 1990** _

_Her relationship with Mark slowly returned to some level of normalcy. As time went on, she felt increasingly assured that he understood the importance of the Statue of Secrecy, and that everything she told him stayed between them. She talked about the Order in very broad terms and mostly to present a contrast to the Death Eaters, since they were the only wizards apart from Lily Mark had any experience with. She explained her own origins and her blood as well as the stigma that came with it in the magical world._

" _So, it's some sort of blood-based racism?" He summarised with a frown._

_They were spending a rainy Sunday inside, lazing about on the sofa and drinking tea as the rain rolled down the large windows in Mark's flat. It was indeed a very nice place – much nicer than a police officer would ever have been able to afford without generous grandparents – and compared to Lily's cramped flat in Clapton where the kitchen had been converted into a makeshift potions lab, it felt like a palace._

" _Yes, I guess that's pretty accurate," Lily replied and took a sip from her tea mug._

" _Seems stupid," Mark commented._

" _More stupid than regular racism?"_

_Mark smiled._

" _I guess not. So, when did you find out you were a witch?"_

" _I think I was seven or eight. As a child I became friends with a boy who lived nearby who was a wizard. His mother was a witch and he told me that I was one as well,"_

" _And you believed him?"_

" _I knew I was different," said Lily simply. "I could do things other children couldn't, and when he told me about magic it made a lot of sense. When I turned eleven one of the teachers from Hogwarts came to tell my parents,_

" _And then you went to a wizarding school? Did you and your friend go to the same one?"_

" _There is only one in Britain, so yes. We were in different houses in school; he was a Slytherin and I was a Gryffindor. Blood prejudice was much more common and socially accepted in Slytherin, and he fell in with a bad crowd. We drifted apart during our time in school, and in fifth year he called me by a very derogatory word, and I refused to speak to him again," she said and felt a wave of sadness roll over her at the memory._

" _You never spoke to him again? Not ever?" Mark asked curiously._

_Lily nodded. "I never forgave him, which in hindsight feels a bit harsh considering the fact that he tried to apologise for ages. On the other hand, he did become a Death Eater after we graduated so maybe it was for the best after all," she explained._

" _He's one of the bastards blowing things up?" Mark asked angrily and Lily shook her head._

" _No. He died many years ago, around the same time as James and Harry," she replied._

_She knew very little about the circumstances around Severus' death, and when she had asked Dumbledore about it a few years into the war, she had not received much of an answer. In fact, that conversation was one of few instances when Lily could recall the headmaster clearly avoiding a subject, and even if she had been somewhat intrigued because of that she had never managed to find anything more out on the subject. Moody had known nothing. Remus had known nothing. Sirius, who had still been angry and alive at the time, had said something scathing about wanting to shake hands with whoever was responsible and then suggested that she was betraying James' and Harry's memory by sympathising with a Death Eater._

_Lily had slapped him across the face, putting all her anger and grief into it, and Sirius had sported a bruise for weeks. They had never made up either, because less than a month later Bellatrix Lestrange hit him with an_ Avada _in the back during an attack in the Underground._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Turns out I needed way more flashbacks than I thought I would, but hopefully you're finding it interesting to see how both Lily and the U.K ended up where they are now.
> 
> When I decided to write this story I knew I didn't want to start out with a canon, 21-year-old Lily because let's be honest, is there a less developed character in this series? (I could see an argument for Ginny, but IMO Ginny is pretty much a copy + paste of Lily with some quidditch skills added on.)
> 
> I knew where I wanted 'my' Lily to be when the story started, but obviously I have to show you guys how she got there.
> 
> As we progress there will be less flashbacks and more plot.


	7. The Pact

**Islington 1996**

Once Lily regained consciousness the devastation was the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes. Most of the block where Grimmauld Place was located was gone, with only a large, gaping hole remaining where dozens of buildings had been just moments ago. Slowly Lily realised the implications. Every single Order member would've been at Grimmauld Place by now. The entire Order... gone. Perhaps some other lucky soul had been running late as well, but otherwise they would all have gone up in flames. Immediately her survival instinct kicked in. She did not have time to mourn her fallen comrades or even consider the full implications of what had just happened. She just had to get to safety. Now. She turned on her heel and started running away from the devastation as muggles around her came out from nearby buildings that were still standing and began shouting and pointing at massive amount of black smoke erupting from what only minutes earlier had been a whole residential block. Her heart was beating loudly in her chest as she hurried down the street in search of a slightly secluded place that she could apparate from.

She had little hope that her first apparition attempt would be successful. The Death Eaters usually placed anti-apparition wards over the areas they were attacking to make it harder for the Order to get there. She ducked into a narrow alley, and to her utter surprise felt herself leaving the carnage of London behind as she pictured the white cliffs of Dover in her head. When it did work, and she landed on a windy hill overlooking the sea she instantly collapsed onto the grass underneath her.

She felt herself starting to hyperventilate and tried to slow down her breathing as she tried to decide what to do next. She desperately tried to summon a happy memory (holding Harry for the first time), and with shaky hands attempted to conjure a Patronus but only managed some pale, white wisps. She tried again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. After another three attempts she gave up and shouted a long string of curse words angrily into the wind.

She made another apparition jump to Eastbourne and then onto her usual spot in Talbot Park near the old council estate where she lived. She nearly ran from the park to her flat in her eagerness to get home and when she did, she collapsed on the couch in the living room and buried her face in her hands.

After a couple of minutes, she gathered her wits and attempted another Patronus, and to her relief her snow leopard leapt out from her wand. She remembered how shocked she had been to see her delicate doe replaced with the predatory feline, but after a few years she had gotten used to the Patronus' new form.

"I need you to go to relay a message to Alastor Moody," she instructed the Patronus. "'I'm alright and I wait for further instructions'," she continued, and the large cat looked quizzically at her before fading away before her.

Her heart sank like a rock.

There was only one explanation to why a Patronus would not even attempt to deliver at message, and she had seen the behaviour too many times before to think it could mean anything else than that the recipient was dead.

She took a deep breath and conjured the Patronus again, this time asking it to deliver a message to Remus.

Nothing.

Aurora.

Nothing.

Emmeline, Sturgis, Amelia.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

Lily fell to her knees with a whimper as the Patronus evaporated after she had asked it to deliver a message to Angelina, who was the last Order member she tried.

Although she had spent most of her time by herself in the last couple of years, she had never felt more alone in her life; it felt as if she was the last person left on earth

For some absurd reason, the person who came to Lily's mind was her sister. Petunia had refused to see her for years following James' and Harry's deaths, and it had been nearly a decade since Lily even knew of her sister's whereabouts. She could no longer find them in the phone register, and she assumed they must have moved abroad. She wondered where Vernon Dursley, who seemed narrow-minded enough to detest all places not England, had taken her sister and their spoilt child. Perhaps they were living on the Costa del Sol along with heaps of other British expats, refusing to learn Spanish or spend time with anyone not entirely English, or maybe they were amongst the masses of Brits who had relocated to North America and Australia. She wondered what Vernon and Petunia would make of the U.S or Canada, or even the Down Under with its laid-back attitude and wild animals.

The mental image of Vernon Dursley finding an alligator in the bathtub or a snake in the kitchen actually managed to make Lily smile in the midst of her misery and gave her the energy to consider what her next step would be.

Lily grabbed the locket around her neck and unclasped the chain. Unlike the others that were made of brass, hers was made of silver, but with the same motif of a phoenix. She knew that she had to act quickly – it was only a matter of time before the world found out about the Order and when it did, she would lose the only thing she had to bargain with.

_9 PM tonight_

She entered into the left side of the locket with her hand and watched as small, golden letters appeared, lingered for a few seconds and then faded away. On the rim of locket there were three tiny screws. Slowly and carefully she turned the first of the screws. On the left side of the locket there were three sets of numbers, and as the turned the first of the screws, one of those numbers began to change. She imagined the number she wanted clearly in her head, and within a matter of seconds, the numbers stopped changing and came to a halt on one beginning with 53, followed by a series of decimals. She then did the same with the second screw and entered a number beginning with -1, and for the last one she entered 2100. Longitude. Latitude. Time. At nine o'clock that evening, Lucius Malfoy's locket would become a portkey and transport him to the park near Lily's flat.

She had never taken anyone to her home before, but if she was going to bargain with Lucius Malfoy, she wanted the advantage of home turf and she would soon leave the flat and never return regardless.

* * *

While she waited for the clock to strike ten, she went through the flat collecting everything she might need and getting rid of the rest. She dumped her newest batch of Polyjuice that she had started brewing on the stove only hours ago, put her best kettle, some of her potions books and notes into her satchel along with most of the ingredients in the cupboard, and dumped the rest in the bin. Her battered, red satchel would've weighed a ton if not for the weightless charm she had placed on it along with the endless extension one.

When the clock was quarter to nine, Lily left her flat and walked to the park. She did not run into a single person on the way and was grateful for not having to obliviate any more teenagers.

She waited in a dark corner of the park, and at nine o'clock sharp a tall figure with platinum blond hair in a neat plaid appeared out of thin air near the muddy pond.

"Malfoy," she called out as she emerged from the shadows.

Malfoy turned around on the spot with his wand drawn.

"Evans," he greeted her and lowered his wand. "Quite advanced magic you've managed to put into these trinkets."

He held up the locket she had left for him in Bethnal Green.

Lily thought she could hear a compliment somewhere in his comment.

"Thanks

"I'm not going anywhere with you before I have some insurance that you're not leading me into a trap set by your little Order friends," he snarled.

Then the Death Eaters did not know about the Order yet. Good, Lily thought, that would buy her some more time.

"Fine, let's do it here, then," she said impatiently. "What do you have in mind? I don't see any potential binders, so an Unbreakable Vow is hardly on the table."

"A blood pact," said Malfoy determinedly.

Lily could not help but laugh.

"You want to enter into a blood pact with a Mudblood?" she asked with an amused voice.

"I _want_ to save my son," Malfoy said through gritted teeth.

"Alright, a blood pact it is," Lily agreed. She was less familiar with that than with Unbreakable Vows or regular Wizard's Oaths, but it hardly mattered much now anyways. "You'll have to take the lead, though, I'm a bit fuzzy on the details."

Malfoy pointed his wand at the palm of his left hand and made a small incision. Blood immediately started pouring from the shallow wound.

"Go on Evans," Malfoy said expectantly, and Lily did not hesitate before she did the same to her own palm.

For a few moments, Malfoy stared at the rich red blood dropping from Lily's palm and she wondered if he was surprised to see that her blood looked identical to his.

Not that it should be a surprise; Malfoy had probably seen the blood of hundreds of Muggles and Muggle-borns, he should know that it all looked the same by now.

"Get over here," he ordered, and Lily took a few steps forward until they were only a few feet apart. "Hold up your hand," he instructed, and Lily obeyed.

She was somewhat surprised when his lined his own palm up with her and clasped it so that she could feel their blood mixing.

"You may start with your terms, Evans," he said.

"Do you, Lucius…," Lily trailed off as she couldn't remember his middle name. She knew it was something strange and pompous that she had never heard outside the Wizarding World, and she was fairly certain it had been his father's name.

"Abraxas," Malfoy supplied.

Lily raised an eyebrow.

"Really? Very well. Do you, Lucius _Abraxas_ Malfoy swear to hand over Tom Riddle's diary to me, Lily Diana Potter on this day, the 6th of October 1998?"

"I do."

Nothing visibly happened, but Lily could feel a short rush of magic through her body as the vow was made.

"And do you swear not to cause me any intentional harm on this day, the 6th of October 1998 as well as tomorrow, the 7th of October 1998?"

Malfoy frowned.

"We're approaching midnight," Lily explained.

"I swear that I will not cause you any intentional harm on this day, or tomorrow," Malfoy swore, and another rush of magic followed.

With that, Lily's terms were finished.

"Do you, Lily Diana Potter swear to do whatever is in your power to help Draco Abraxas Malfoy?" Malfoy said.

"I swear that I will help Draco Malfoy-" Lily began but was cut off.

" _To do whatever is in your power!"_ Malfoy corrected with a growl.

"I swear that if I can help Draco in this universe or any other, I will do it," Lily swore with a roll of her eyes.

Malfoy seemed satisfied with that and moved on.

"Do you swear to cause me no intentional harm on this day, the 6th of October 1998, or tomorrow, the 7th of October 1998?"

"I do," Lily vowed, and two drops of blood rose from their interlaced hands and merged into one nearly a metre up in the air. A vial formed around the drop and slowly descended towards the ground.

They released their hands and Malfoy caught the vial.

"Do you want it?" He asked and Lily shrugged.

"Does it matter?"

"No, it's supposedly impossible to destroy."

"Keep it then," said Lily and Malfoy put it in the inner pocket of his expensive-looking cloak.

"I want to know what your plan is for Draco," said Malfoy brusquely.

"We shouldn't stay here, the parks tend to attract a lot of strange visitors at night," said Lily anxiously.

Malfoy gave a curt nod.

"Lead the way, then."

They walked in silence along the pathway to Lily's home, and thankfully it was just as abandoned as it had been when she had walked to the park earlier. Malfoy wrinkled his nose when she led him inside the building where her flat was located.

"You live here?" He asked with an appalled look on his face as he took in the dirty, grey walls in the building's entrance.

Lily shrugged.

"I figured you people would be more likely to leave me alone here than in some fancy townhouse in London."

"A couple of years ago, perhaps, but many of those who work at the Ministry have discovered the benefits of living in central London. Most of the better parts of town have been untouched for a long time now," Malfoy pointed out.

"You blew up a whole residential block in Islington today," she reminded him as they climbed the last set of stairs up to Lily's floor, and Malfoy gave her a perplexed look.

"No, we didn't," he protested.

Lily snorted. "Why do you even bother lying about something like that? It's hardly any worse than what you've done before," she said bitterly.

Malfoy shook his head. "I'm not lying. The bomb in London was not ours, we were as surprised as you were."

Lily came to a sudden halt just outside the door to her flat. "B-but… if it wasn't you… who was it?"

Malfoy shrugged. "Who knows, perhaps it was one of those… what are they called? Gauze leaks?" He said with a bored voice.

"It's never gas leaks," Lily muttered and unlocked the door.

Back when the Statue of Secrecy was still in place, gas leaks had been one of the muggle authorities' standard explanations for some of the devastating explosions that had taken many innocent lives.

"We're getting off track, Evans. What are you going to do for Draco?" Malfoy wanted to know when they were both safe inside the flat.

Malfoy sneered at the interior in the flat as well but did not comment as Lily lead him into the living room.

"Put him on a plane to New Zeeland," she answered simply.

"One of those aeroplanes?" Malfoy questioned doubtfully.

"It's the quickest and easiest way to travel without magic, and since travelling with magic always leaves traces, the muggle way is a safer bet," she explained.

Lily took a look at her palm. The wound had closed and a crusty layer had formed, but it was an awkward place, so Lily took out her wand and a non-verbal healing spell later the skin on her palm was as smooth as it had been an hour ago.

Malfoy seemed to want to follow her example, because he took out his wand and waved it, but it failed to produce any magic. He tried again, but the wand remained unresponsive.

"Evans. What have you done?" He growled accusingly.

Lily frowned. She hadn't placed any enchantments on the flat that should interfere with any spellcasting, and Malfoy was evidently having massive troubles because he had now resorted to trying a long string of verbal spells ranging from simple ones like _Wingardium Leviosa_ to highly advanced dark curses. Nothing worked.

"What are you playing at, Evans? Have you cast some sort of magic-repellent enchantment?" He growled in frustration after he failed to levitate one of the pillows on the sofa.

Lily successfully cast a verbal _lumos_ with her own wand to prove that there was indeed no such enchantment in place.

"I don't understand," Malfoy said warily.

"Nor do I," said Lily slowly.

The wards, she thought, it must have something to do with the wards, but since it only affected Malfoy and not herself it must also have something to do with him. She searched her mind for possible explanations to why a wizard would all of a sudden lose his magic. What could her wards possibly have triggered?

"Oh," she breathed as she came to a realisation. Suddenly several pieces of a larger puzzle that she had been trying to solve for years fell into place.

"What? Why is this happening to me?" Malfoy snarled back and Lily dashed into the kitchen and pulled out one of the kitchen drawers where she found a small vial of green liquid that she had put there less than a fortnight ago.

She went back into the living room and held the vial up in front of Malfoy's face.

"This. You must recognise it; we've found them on every Death Eater for the past six years, I bet you have one in your own cloak right now," she said forcefully.

Malfoy nodded slowly. "Yes," he confirmed.

"He's told you that it's something that will help you, hasn't he? Something that will make you resist interrogation, or maybe even help you escape if you're captured by the Order," she guessed.

Malfoy did not respond, but his silence was an answer in itself.

"Well, he's lying. I've analysed the potion myself, and seen it ingested once. It's not pretty. It's a slow, agonising death, nearly an hour of the worst pain you can imagine, and at that point death is probably a relief."

"And your point is, Evans?" Malfoy drawled haughtily but Lily could tell that he was less confident than he had been a couple of minutes ago.

"I just couldn't figure out why he was counting on every single one in his ranks actually taking it if it came down to it," said Lily. "Bellatrix probably would, and perhaps some of the other truly fanatic ones, but I couldn't see every single Death Eater being willing to take an unknown potion even if they had been told it would help them. Frankly, I couldn't believe he was expecting that either. Now I understand that of course he doesn't expect it, he must have some other guarantee. An Unbreakable Vow, for instance."

Lily could immediately see on Malfoy's face that she was right.

"You've sworn an Unbreakable Vow that if you're captured by the Order you will take the potion, haven't you?"

"I've not been captured by the Order," Malfoy snapped.

Lily gave him a pitying look.

"Well, the problem is that you've walked straight into my flat, which is warded with highly complex spells, amongst them an enemy-prevention enchantment. The reason it hasn't gone off is because I was the one to bring you here, which probably counts as you being captured. The Vow must recognise it even if your mind hasn't realised it yet."

Malfoy stared at her with a mix of shock and pure anger.

"You foul bitch," he spat venomously. "Drop the bloody wards, immediately!"

"You know it's too late, Lucius. When our bodies shut down, the magical core is drained first; that's why you can't do any magic. You're dying," Lily said. "For the last minutes of your life you will effectively be a muggle. Isn't that ironic."

"You knew this would happen!"

"No," Lily denied sincerely. "I honestly had no idea. I vowed less than half an hour ago that I would do nothing to cause any _intentional_ harm. If I'd known I wouldn't have been able to bring you here."

Out of the blue, Malfoy lunged at her, but he stumbled and instead collapsed on the floor. He clutched his abdomen and started panting heavily.

Lily had never seen anyone breaking an Unbreakable Vow before and had no idea how long it would take for the vow to kill him. It seemed less agonising than Voldemort's concoction, but it was definitely not painless.

She reached into her satchel and grabbed a flask with a deep, purple liquid inside which she uncorked and handed to the wizard on the floor.

"Malfoy, take this, it will knock you out," she instructed calmly, almost kindly, and she realised he must be in quite some pain since he didn't say a word – he just poured the potion into his mouth without hesitation, and in less than a few seconds he was unconscious.

His breathing got increasingly shallower in the next couple of minutes and a couple of times his limbs would spasm. The clock was only a little after eleven when Lucius Malfoy passed away on the living room floor in a dingy flat outside Sheffield.

When she was sure that he was really gone, Lily searched through all the pockets on his cloak and robes and in addition to another vial of the green liquid, she also found an old-looking, leather-bound diary with the name Tom Marvolo Riddle embossed.

Unlike the duplicate Malfoy had shown her in Godric's Hollow, this one truly did practically exude dark magic, and when she held it in her hands the diary felt _alive,_ just like Helga Hufflepuff's cup had done. Lily was certain that she was holding another horcrux.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: I had a lot of trouble with this chapter. We're getting into more plot-heavy territory (compared to the first couple of chapters which have been mostly set-up), and it was a real challenge writing the scene with Lily and Lucius.
> 
> The "real" plot is still two or three chapters away, however, but please bear with me.
> 
> Also, reviews give me life and will to write (and edit), so I'd love to hear from all of you. What do you think of Mark, for instance?
> 
> Also, a chapter without flashbacks, yay or nay?


	8. The End

THE END  
London 1992

PM reveals truth about terrorists! Magicians responsible!

It’s a kind of magic? Warlocks to blame for violent U.K attacks.

_One newspaper after the other shouted their witty headlines at Lily. The muggles knew, the Statue of Secrecy was broken, what no one had ever expected to happen had come true. Lily absentmindedly handed over a couple of coins to a young man selling newspapers from a stand on the street and waved him off as he tried to hand back the change. Lily hurriedly opened the newspaper up and immediately found the main article on the second page._

Were the witch trials not a fluke? Reliable sources describe a ‘Magical Hitler’ at large in the U.K.

_‘Magical Hitler’. There was something about that wording…_

_It hit her like a brick. It was Mark’s wording; Mark’s way of summarising Voldemort after she had told him about the dark wizard. It could be a coincidence, of course - there was after all nothing British newspapers enjoyed more than a sensational headline - but Lily’s gut feeling was telling her something else. She stuffed the newspaper into her satchel, ducked into a slightly secluded alley and apparated to the street outside Mark’s flat._

_Mark was sitting on the couch with a cup of espresso in his hand and his head bowed deep in thought, with the BBC news on low volume on the telly when Lily burst into the flat._

_She didn’t bother taking off her coat or shoes, she just marched up to him and placed herself directly in his line of vision. She slammed the newspaper down on the coffee table in front of the sofa with such force that the candle holders rattled against the glass surface._

_“When did you do it?” she asked calmly and looked him straight in the eye._

_Mark closed his eyes._

_“Lily, I… I didn’t mean-“_

_“Merlin, you’re not even going to deny it,” she exclaimed._

_Mark kept his gaze firmly fixed on the hardwood floor._

_“You already seem to know,” he responded slowly._

_Lily huffed._

_“When did you do it? Did you go to your boss the day after I told you I was a witch?”_

_Silence echoed between them as Mark shifted uncomfortably on the couch._

_“No,” he eventually denied._

_“You waited then? Did you sense an opportunity to climb the ladder? Was it a career move?” Lily spat viciously._

_“No, not really,” he said warily._

_“What was it then?”_   
_“I’m not at liberty to discuss-“_

_“Fuck your liberty!” Lily shouted. “You’ve single-handedly revealed a secret that has been kept for centuries and which could very well unleash a civil war.”_

_“I’m not a police officer,” Mark confessed eventually. He looked up at her with his dark blue eyes that Lily had always thought looked like two oceans. Now the only thing she could see as she looked into the two dark orbs was shame._

_Lily stared at him with genuine surprise on her face._

_“What?”_

_Mark ran both his hands through his hair._

_“I used to be, but it was long ago now. For the last decade I’ve been with MI6.”_

_“Intelligence…” Lily whispered._

_“Yes,” Mark confirmed._

_Lily snorted. “You must’ve thought you hit a jackpot when you realised what I was.”_

_Mark would not meet her gaze, and Lily felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach._

_“What are you not telling me?” she asked slowly._

_Mark gave her a pleading look._

_“It wasn’t a jackpot. It wasn’t a coincidence,” he said miserably. “One of my colleagues saw you helping a couple of girls who were being harassed in an alleyway in Shoreditch when he was on his way home from work. He saw you using your wand and realised you were one of them, so he tailed you and followed you to the pub and then to your flat in Clapton.”_

_Lily felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach._

_“He brought it up at work and everyone agreed that it was an opportunity to learn more about an enemy we knew next to nothing about. My boss thought… It was decided that… that I would be the best person for the job,”_

_“The job,” Lily repeated bitterly. “Why? Because you’re handsome and most women would be flattered if you as much as talked to them?”_

_Mark did not answer._

_“I can’t believe it… I’ve never felt more stupid in my life,” Lily muttered. “So, you did it,” she whispered. She touched her left cheek and was surprised to find it damp – she had not even realised she had started crying. “You seduced the terrorist.”_

_Once again did Mark not even deign to answer her._

_“So, I guess that makes you the James Bond then,” Lily said bitterly. “What a gold mine of information I’ve been.”_

_“Well, for the first nine months I got no information at all,” Mark said. “But I got something else,”_

_“What?”_

_“You,” he said, and Lily snorted loudly. “I’m serious Lily, and I completely understand that you don’t believe me, but I don’t want you to think that all of this is fabricated,” he pleaded._

_“But then after nine months the Death Eaters conveniently decided to schedule an attack in your neighbourhood when we were walking home from the pub.”_

_“No,” he whispered._

_“What do you mean? It must’ve been the best thing that could’ve happened after a nine-month drought, you ought to thank them,” she said sarcastically._

_“It wasn’t a Death Eater attack,” he said quietly. “The higher-ups were growing impatient for progress, and since I’d told them that I didn’t think you would reveal anything unless you were in a tight spot, they decided to put you in one. There was a controlled explosion a street away from the one we always took home for the tube, and one of my colleagues volunteered to… stand in as a fake wizard, to provoke you to use your wand.”_

_Lily stared at him in disbelief._

_“It wasn’t real? It was orchestrated? I could’ve killed someone!”_

_She didn’t remember much about the attack, but she could recall finding it odd how the Death Eater they had ran into on the street hadn’t even tried to defend himself when Lily hexed him._

_“Gillespie was well aware of the risks,” Mark mumbled._

_Suddenly Lily wasn’t crying anymore; anger had replaced any sadness she had previously felt._

_“Why?”_

_“I thought it was for the best. How are we supposed to fight an enemy we know nothing about?”_

_“You’re not supposed to fight them at all! We are supposed to fight them,” Lily exclaimed._

_Mark stood up forcefully._

_“But they are fighting us, Lily! They are killing us. Are we supposed to just stand by and let them?” he asked and for the first time there was a tinge of anger in his voice._

_“The Order-“_

_“The Order is evidently not enough, because innocent people keep being murdered,” Mark cut her off._

_Lily stared at him for what felt like hours. At some point since she arrived the skies above London had opened and the rain was angrily beating against the windows._

_“Dumbledore once told me that one muggle wouldn’t be able to break the Statue of Secrecy. He was hardly ever wrong about anything, but boy was he wrong about that,” Lily said icily._

_“Why_

_“Because you’ve put a target on the back of every witch and wizard of any age in this country. On children, Mark! You’ve told them everything!”_

_“Not everything,” Mark objected._

_“Oh, really? What have you left out?”_

_“I didn’t tell them about muggle-borns,” he said. “Every parent in the country would be mad with worry that their child might turn out to be magical. Not to mention that there is no guarantee what the government might do with those children if they found them.”_

_“Considering how efficiently the Death Eaters hunt down Muggle-born children these days I doubt there are any left for the muggle authorities to traumatise,” said Lily coldly._

_“I also didn’t tell them about Hogwarts.”_

_Small mercies, Lily thought. The mere idea of the muggle government finding out about Hogwarts was enough to make her shudder._

_“What happens now?” Mark asked after another long pause._

_Lily sighed._

_“Mark, this has been going on for years. You’ve been systematically lying to me from the moment we met. Everything we have is built on not one lie, but an abundance of them,” she said tiredly._

_“And you haven’t been lying to me? What about all the times you asked about what the police were thinking about the attacks?” he countered._

_“Don’t even try to make this into my fault,” Lily spat. “I told the others in the Order that knowing someone working for the muggle authorities could be useful, but frankly that was more of an excuse to get to know you. I don’t think I’ve seriously tried to pressure you for information since our second date. I told you everything the day we ran into that Death Eater, or I suppose one of your colleagues, on the way home from the pub.”_

_Mark did not respond and Lily looked around the room. Suddenly everything in there felt more impersonal than ever, and she remembered how many times she had reflected on how the interior of the place did not seem to suit Mark._

_“I guess that explains the fancy flat,” Lily said. “Is it even yours?”_

_Mark shook his head. “All my grandparents died before I was born and none of them left me as much as a storage cupboard. The flat belongs to the firm, I was granted use of it in order to be able to stay in central London while the… mission was carried out. I used to commute from Milton Keynes.”_

_“Milton Keynes?”_

_Mark shrugged._

_“I dislike living in the city,”_

_Lily shook her head in disbelief and buttoned her coat. The man in front of her whom she had spent the suddenly felt like a stranger._

_“Where are you going?” Mark asked with a tinge of worry in his voice._

_“I’m going to clean up the mess you’ve made,” she muttered. “It’s probably chaos at headquarters right now.”_

_“Are you coming back?” He asked with a small voice._

_The truth was that Lily did not know – the wound from the betrayal was still too fresh to be assessed – but she would not tell him that._

_“Don’t be greedy Mark, you’ve gotten information from me for over two years, surely that is much more than you and your colleagues estimated,” she said coldly and apparated away before his eyes._

1996

Lily did not know how long she sat on the living room floor next to the corpse of a man who had once been one of the people she hated most in the world. Although her opinion of him had somewhat changed since Narcissa’s death she could not overlook the never-ending list of heinous crimes he had committed over the years. She took a closer look at the diary and quickly realised that its’ pages were just as blank as the duplicate’s had been. All previous horcruxes had been heavily warded, and since this one had not been left in a secure location there was no doubt in Lily’s mind that the object itself must have its’ own protection.

She wondered how much time she had. Once Voldemort realised that the Order was gone he might let his guard down for a while and maybe that could give her the opportunity to-

No. Who knew how many horcruxes there were left. Dumbledore had presented a theory in his memories that it would be seven, but Lily thought there was not nearly enough evidence to assume that. The best thing Lily could do was to get herself to the place where there was a reasonable chance that another might be, and if she was successful get it destroyed along with the diary.

As she was pondering what she should do before leaving her flat for good she heard the unmistakable sound of a door handle turning and her blood ran cold. She had warded the place as much as she could, and the only way one would be able to enter the flat was if they knew it existed and actively looked for it. She had told no one of its’ location or even which city it was in, and she could not imagine who could possibly be on the other side of the door.

Lily raised her wand and had a jinx ready at the tip of her tongue as the door swung open and revealed a tall figure in muggle clothing.

Lily could not mask her surprise at seeing Mark McAuley stumble into her ratty flat in his tailored, grey coat and shiny leather shoes. Despite still being an undeniably handsome man, he looked as if he had aged at least a decade since she last saw him three years ago with heavy bags under his eyes and a worried look on his face.

When he spotted Lily, he let out a loud breath of relief.

“You’re alive. Oh my God, Lily, I didn’t know, I swear,” he said pleadingly and rushed over to envelope her in a tight hug.

“Mark? What are you doing here? How did you find me?” She asked with equal parts irritation and relief in her voice and detangled herself from the embrace. The familiar scent of Mark’s cologne hit her like a brick and despite everything she realised that she had missed him.

“I tried to call you,” Mark continued as if he hadn’t heard her question.

Lily frowned.

“You were the one calling me earlier?”

Mark nodded.

“I was in London, it was the only way I could reach you in time, but you didn’t pick up.”

“How did you get my number?” Lily wanted to know.

“I recently found out. Last week we got a report about five teenagers being found unconscious on a playground outside Sheffield. They were all disoriented when they woke up, but one of them had a vague memory of a red-haired woman pointing a wooden stick at her. The local authorities relayed all the information to us, and it only took me a couple of days to figure out which flat was yours,” he explained.

Lily said a long string of curse words under her breath. She knew she had hurried too much when obliviating the teenagers at the playground the previous week.

“What are you doing here?” She said again.

“Please, Lily, I swear I didn’t know,” Mark repeated.

“What did you not know, Mark?” Lily asked sternly.

Mark took a deep breath.

“The government has been desperate for progress for months now, they feel that they need to show the world that they are taking action against the wizards,” he began.

“Action?” Lily echoed.

“It was decided nearly a month ago that an operation would be carried out against the only location known to host wizards.”

Lily stared at him in shock and disbelief.

“It wasn’t the Death Eaters who blew up Grimmauld Place. It was you,” she whispered.

“I wasn’t involved, I only found out this morning.”

“How many people died?” She asked. “In addition to the eleven Order members, how many of its’ own citizens did the government murder today?”

Mark shifted uncomfortably.

“The surrounding muggle buildings were discreetly evacuated earlier in the afternoon, but of course there were casualties on the streets...”

“How many?” Lily repeated.

“The count is around a dozen at the moment,” Mark confessed.

“And the muggle government plans on taking credit for this?” Lily asked incredulously.

Mark nodded.

“Yes. They intend to frame it in a way that they had discovered a terrorist cell, and that the terrorists set off the explosives when they realised that they were cornered. They want to emphasise the part about finding the location and eliminating a number of wizards rather than focusing on the civilian lives that were lost.”

“And the reason they knew the location is because you told them,” Lily said.

Mark at least had the decency to look ashamed.

“I told them about a townhouse in Islington years ago, how they manage to pinpoint the exact location… I have no clue, to be honest. I don’t have access to that kind of sensitive information anymore.”

Lily didn’t ask why.

“The entire Order is gone, Mark! The only people who would and could stand up to You-Know-Who are dead! He’s going to win, and all of us are probably going to die,” she said instead.

Lily had never said the words before, never allowed herself to even consider the possibility, but she had also never before been the last living member of the Order of the Phoenix.

“The military has been stocking up on explosives. Magical or not, I bet a large bomb would do some damage to him too,” Mark said confidently.

Lily laughed joylessly.

“There’s so much you don’t know.”

“Then tell me!” Mark insisted. “Tell me what I don’t know.”

“Tell you? Do you remember what happened the last time I told you something? Despite promising you wouldn’t, you ran to your boss and colleagues and told them everything.”

The silence hung in the air between them for a long while. Lily could see the end of Lucius Malfoy’s ponytail from where she was standing in the kitchen and as she replayed the day’s events in her mind, she could hardly believe they had actually happened. As far as bad days went, this was a close second to October 31st 1981.

“I hope you realise that if I’d known what they were planning I would’ve tried to stop it,” Mark eventually said in a low voice.

“Well, it hardly matters now. You should leave, I have much to do,” Lily said tiredly.

She had never asked Moody where he disposed of dead bodies, but it was not as if it really mattered if Malfoy was found in a couple of days. Perhaps she would smuggle him into a morgue and have him buried as an unknown muggle, there would at least be some irony in that.

“Let me help, Lily, let me do something, anything,” Mark begged.

Lily thought for a few moments and then grabbed an empty glass vial from the kitchen counter. She pointed her wand at her left temple and pulled out a long, silvery string of memories that she guided into the vial with the tip of her wand.

Mark stared at her with wide open eyes but did not make a comment.

“If you ever run into another witch or wizard who seems interested in taking You-Know-Who down, you should give them this,” Lily said and handed him the vial.

“What is it?” Mark asked and eyed it suspiciously.

“The key to destroying him,” she answered tiredly.

Mark looked at her warily.

“Why are you giving me this?”

Lily smiled sadly.

“I’m going to do as much damage as I can, but I doubt it’s going to be enough,” she said earnestly.

“Lily…”

She cut him off before he could continue.

“My son died fifteen years ago, Mark. Everything I’ve done since then has been to avenge him, and I came to terms with the fact that it would cost me my own life years ago. I was supposed to be home that night, I was supposed to die alongside them, but I didn’t. Every minute of my life feels like borrowed time; time I’m not supposed to have.”

“Really? That’s how you felt all that time?” He asked and clearly referred to the years they had been together.

“I’ve never been happier after Harry’s death than I was when I was with you. When we were together, I used to imagine a life for us together after the war was won,” she confessed. “I used to imagine us moving in together and getting rid of those uncomfortable, fancy chairs in your flat and connecting the fireplace to the Floo network so I could easily get to whatever normal job I would have. On Friday evenings after you were done with your normal job we would go to our pub in Shoreditch and Charlie at the bar would tell us outrageous stories of celebrities who had allegedly gotten drunk there.”

Mark looked down on the floor.

Lily continued. “Sometimes I even imagined that we would have a child or two, and that we would get to do all the things I never had the chance to do with Harry. Teach them to ride a bike, take them to the sea and let them dip their feet and fat little legs in the water. Wave them off at King’s Cross as they boarded the Hogwarts Express…”

“When I found out that you had lied to me all along… You destroyed the one thing I had in my life that had nothing to do with the war against You-Know-Who. After over a decade of only fighting for vengeance for the past, I had started fighting for a future, but I didn’t realise it until I had lost it.” Lily’s voice wavered and she felt tears threatening to erupt at any moment.

The silence hung between them for what could be anything from seconds to hours.

“Is there anything I can do to help you? Anything at all?” Mark eventually asked quietly.

Lily thought for a few moments and then took a couple of deep breaths. She spotted Malfoy’s blond head in the corner of the eye.

“Do you know how to dispose of a corpse?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN: Long time no see. A lot has changed in the world since I last posted, but with uni closing down and me being stuck on my paper I figured I could write a bit on this instead. I’m considering taking down the chapters I’ve written and re-working them because I want to pace things a bit differently (too many flashbacks in some chapters for instance) but I haven’t decided whether I’m going to do that or just write the whole thing down and rewrite things later.


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